Doctor’s novel cuts deep

Author weaves historical drama, love story into his followup novel

Author Daniel Kalla near the seaplane base.

Photograph by: Jon Murray
, PNG

Rising Sun, Falling Shadow

By Daniel Kalla (Harper Collins)

The Far Side of the Sky, the 2011 novel from Vancouver writer Daniel Kalla, was something of a surprise. While the emergency room doctor had dabbled with historical fiction in his 2010 family saga Of Flesh and Blood, his first five novels, all bestsellers, had been cutting-edge thrillers based in the medical world, earning him comparisons with Michael Crichton.

With The Far Side of the Sky, though, Kalla embraced historical fiction fully, drawing readers back to the late 1930s and early 1940s to follow Dr. Franz Adler as he flees his home in Vienna with his daughter to Shanghai, in order to escape the rising Nazi threat. In Shanghai, Adler falls in with the expatriate community — with decidedly mixed results — and finds work at the makeshift Jewish refugee hospital. It’s there that he meets Soon Yi “Sunny” Mah, an outspoken, intelligent, highly trained nurse. The two outsiders are drawn together, and the rest is, well, history. The Far Side of the Sky satisfied as both a historical drama and a love story, with tightly drawn characters and intricate cultural complexities set against a skilfully rendered period backdrop.

Kalla’s new novel Rising Sun, Falling Shadow picks up Adler and Sunny’s story in early 1943. The Japanese have consolidated control over Shanghai, but their tense tolerance of the Jewish refugee community is tested with their increasing acquiescence to the demands of their Nazi partners. Thus Adler and his community, who have heard horror stories of the ghettos in Europe, find themselves forcibly relocated to a tiny section of one of the city’s slums, 20,000 people crammed into the single square kilometre of the Shanghai Ghetto. Malnutrition and disease run rampant, and suspicions about the activities of a resistance movement operating within and outside the ghetto keep suspicions high, and raise the levels of danger for all of the city’s Jews.

Rising Sun, Falling Shadow is a fast-paced, powerful successor to The Far Side of the Sky. To answer the inevitable question first, yes, you could likely read it on its own — the background is explained judiciously enough — but it is a more powerful reading experience if you have read The Far Side of the Sky (and better still if you read them back to back).

Despite this relationship, Rising Sun, Falling Shadow is something of a different novel than its predecessor. Despite the geographic limitations, it feels somehow larger, broader.

While The Far Side of the Sky was focused on the finest of details and intricacies, Rising Sun, Falling Shadow seems to take a step back to tell larger stories. At times this is problematic. When Adler begins to treat a new patient at the hospital at the behest of his friend, the artist Ernest Muhler — who fled Shanghai in danger over his dissident art and his homosexuality in the first novel — the steps they take to conceal the patient’s identity veer dangerously close to slapstick, weakening the depths of the peril the characters face by sheltering him. Similarly, the suspicion that Sunny might be having an affair when she is, in fact, involved with the resistance, rings of the sort of melodrama of contrived misunderstanding usually found in sitcoms.

That being said, other parts of the novel capitalize and build on the underlying danger of the times. When Adler’s daughter is drawn into a smuggling operation, bringing cigarettes and other items through the armed checkpoints, the tension ratchets to an almost unbearable level, and Kalla demonstrates a masterful skill with the delicacy needed for genuine suspense.

Rising Sun, Falling Shadow succeeds admirably as a historical drama, its slight wobbles balanced out by the care with which Kalla captures both his characters and the world they inhabit: it’s a vivid, realistic novel that rewards the emotional investment it encourages.

Victoria writer Robert J. Wiersema is the author of Before I Wake and Bedtime Story. His new novel, Black Feathers, will be published next year.

We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to avoid personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful. If you encounter a comment that is abusive, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. We are using Facebook commenting. Visit our FAQ page for more information.